CHAPTER III.

THE ETHNOLOGICAL VALUE OF LOCAL NAMES.

Local names are the beacon-lights of primeval History-The method of re search illustrated by American Names-Recent progress of Ethnology— The Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Northmen-Retrocession of the SclavesArabic Names-Ethnology of mountain districts—The Alps.

ETHNOLOGY is the science which derives the greatest aid from geographical etymology. The names which still remain upon our maps are able to supply us with traces of the history of nations that have left us no other memorials. Egypt has bequeathed to us her pyramids, her temples, and her tombs; Nineveh her palaces; Judæa her people and her sacred books; Mexico her temple-mounds; Arabia her science; India her institutions and her myths; Greece her deathless literature; and Rome has left us her roads, her aqueducts, her laws, and the languages which still live on the lips of half the civilized world. But there are other nations which once played a prominent part in the world's history, but which have bequeathed no written annals, which have constructed no monuments, whose language is dying or is dead, whose blood is becoming undistinguishably mingled with that of other races. The knowledge of the history and the migrations of such tribes must be recovered from the study of the names of the places which they once inhabited, but which now know them no morefrom the names of the hills which they fortified, of the rivers by which they dwelt, of the distant mountains upon which they gazed. As an eloquent writer has observed, "Mountains and rivers still murmur the voices of nations long denationalized or extirpated." Language adheres to the soil when the race by

which it was spoken has been swept from off the earth, or when its remnants have been driven from the plains which they once peopled into the fastnesses of the surrounding mountains.

It is mainly from the study of local names that we must reconstruct the history of the Sclaves, the Celts, and the Basques, as well as the earlier chronicles of the Scandinavian and Teutonic races; while from the same source we are able to throw great light upon the more or less obscure records of the conquests and colonizations of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs. In many instances, we can thus convert dubious surmises into the clearest historical certainties.

The nomenclature of America, the nature of which has been indicated in the preceding chapter, may serve to explain the method by which etymological considerations become available in ethnological inquiries. Here we have a simple case, in which we possess documentary evidence as to the facts which we might expect to be disclosed by etymological investigations, and where we can thus exhibit the method of research, and at the same time test the value of the results to which it leads.

If we examine a map of America, we find names derived from a dozen languages. We first notice a few scattered Indian names, such as the POTOMAC, the RAPPAHANOCK, or NIAGARA. These names are sparsely distributed over large areas, some of them filled almost exclusively with English names, while in others the names are mostly of Spanish or Portuguese originthe boundary between the regions of the English and Spanish, or of the Spanish and Portuguese names, being easily traceable. In Louisiana and Lower Canada we find a predominance of French names, many of them exhibiting Normand and Breton peculiarities. In New York we find, here and there, a few Dutch names, as well as patches of German names in Michigan and Brazil. We find that the Indian, Dutch, and French names have more frequently been corrupted than those derived either from the English or from the Spanish languages. In New England we find names like SALEM and PROVIDENCE; in Virginia we find such names as JAMES River, Cape CHARLES, and ELIZABETH County. In many places the names of the Old World are repeated: we find a NEW ORLEANS, a NEW BRUNSWICK, a NEW HAMPSHIRE, and the like.

If we were entirely destitute of any historical records of the actual course of American colonization, it is evident that, with the aid of the map alone, we might recover many most important facts, and put together an outline, by no means to be despised, of the early history of the continent; we might successfully investigate the retrocession and extinction of the Indian tribes-we might discover the positions in which the colonies of the several European nations were planted-we might show, from the character of the names, how the gradually increasing supremacy of the Anglo-American stock must have enabled it to incorporate, and overlay with a layer of English names, the colonies of other nations, such as the Spanish settlements in Florida and Texas, the Dutch colony in the neighbourhood of New York, and the French settlements on the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. We might even go further, and attempt to discriminate between the colonies founded by Puritans and by Cavaliers; and if we possessed a knowledge of English and French history, we might assign approximate dates for the original foundation of a large number of the several settlements. In some cases we might be able to form probable conjectures as to the causes and methods of the migration, and the condition of the early colonists. Our investigations would be much facilitated if we also possessed a full knowledge of the present circumstances of the country--if, for example, we knew that the English language now forms the universal medium of communication throughout large districts, which, nevertheless, are filled with Spanish or French names; or if we learned that in the State of New York the Indian and Dutch languages are no longer spoken, while many old families bear Dutch, but none of them Indian surnames. The study of the local names, illustrated by the knowledge of such facts, would enable us to reconstruct, in great part, the history of the country, and would prove that successive bands of immigrants may forget their mother tongue, and abandon all distinctive national peculiarities, but that the names which, on their first arrival, they bestowed upon the places of their abode, are sure to remain upon the map as a permanent record of the nature and extent of the original colonizations.

We shall hereafter investigate classes of names which present

a perfect parallelism to those in America. In the case of Spain, the Iberian, Celtic, Phoenician, Arabic, and Spanish names answer in many points to the strata of Indian, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English names which we find superimposed in the United States; while an isolated name like SWEDESBORO', in New Jersey, may be compared with that of the town of ROZAS, which stands upon the Gulf of RHODA-names which have handed down the memory of the ancient Rhodian colony in North-eastern Spain. The phenomena of the Old World are similar to those presented in the New. In either case, from similar phenomena we may draw similar inferences.

This method of research—the application of which has been exhibited in the familiar instance of the United States, where the results attained can be compared with well-known facts—has of late years been repeatedly applied, and often with great success, to cases in which local names are the only records which exist. Wilhelm von Humboldt was one of the pioneers in this new science of etymological ethnology. On the maps of Spain, France, and Italy he has marked out, by the evidence of names alone, the precise regions which, before the period of the Roman conquest, were inhabited by those Euskarian or Iberic races who are now represented by the Basques-the mountaineers of the Asturias and the Pyrenees. He has also shown that large portions of Spain were anciently Celtic, and that there was a central zone inhabited by a mixed population of Euskarians and Celts.

By a similar process Prichard demonstrated that the ancient Belge were of Celtic, and not of Teutonic race, as had previously been supposed. So cogent is the evidence supplied by these names, that ethnologists are agreed in setting aside the direct testimony of such a good authority as Cæsar, who asserts that the Belge were of German blood. Archdeacon Williams, in like manner, has indicated the limits of the Celtic region in Northern Italy, and has pointed out detached Celtic colonies in the central portion of that peninsula. Other industrious explorers have followed the wanderings of this ancient people through Switzerland, Germany, and France, and have shown that, in those countries, the Celtic speech still lives upon the map, though it has vanished from the glossary.

In our country, this method has afforded results of peculiar interest and value. It has enabled us to detect the successive tides of immigration that have flowed in; as the ripple-marked slabs of sandstone record the tidal flow of the primeval ocean, so wave after wave of population-Gaelic, Cymric, Roman, Saxon, Anglian, Frisian, Norwegian, Danish, Norman and Flemish has left its mark upon the once shifting, but now indurated sands of language. The modern map of our own islands enables us to prove that almost the whole of England was once Celtic, and shews us that the Scottish lowlands were peopled by tribes belonging to the Welsh and not to the Gaelic stock. The study of Anglo-Saxon names enables us to trace the nature and progress of the Teutonic settlement, and to draw the line between the Anglian and the Saxon kingdoms; while the Scandinavian village-names of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Caithness, Cumberland, Pembrokeshire, Iceland, and Normandy, teach us the almost-forgotten story of the fierce Vikings, who left the fiords of Norway and the vics of Denmark, to plunder and to conquer the coasts and kingdoms of Western Europe.

The same method enables us to investigate the obscure relations of the tribes of Eastern Europe, to mark the oscillations of the boundaries of the Sclaves and Germans, and even to detect the alternate encroachments and retrocessions of either race. Sclavonic names, scattered over Central and Western Germany, lead us to infer that, at some remote period, the Sclavonians must have extended themselves westward much beyond their present frontier of Bohemia, even as far as Darmstadt, where the River WESCHNITZ marks the extreme western limit of Sclavonic occupancy. For several centuries, however, the German language has been encroaching towards the east; and the process is now going on with accelerated speed. In Bohemia, where almost every local name is Sclavonic, and where five-and-twenty years ago few of the elder people knew any language but their Bohemian speech, we find that the adults are now universally able to speak German; and in half a century, there is every likelihood that the Bohemian language will be extinct. Farther to the north a similar process has also taken place. Proceeding from west to east, the River